Thoughts & musings from a Microsoft Business Applications Ninja!
Talking to Julian about the wonders of using IoT & AI capabilities with cats, communicating openly with customers, & putting internal comments into project documentation!
#community #learning #sharing #ownthemistake #theoopsfactor #MVPBuzzhttps://youtu.be/82JkiaLQjtE
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Talking with Girish about the wonders of having a child (hint – she may be advanced in certain scientific items already!), his love of cricket, and being able to keep positive through very challenging situations.
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Interesting title, isn’t it? I thought to do something that might grab peoples attention, and this was the best that I could come up with! So, let’s get into the scenario, the issue experienced, and how we managed to resolve it.
The scenario on this project was as follows. We’ve been implementing a customer service solution for a sales company, that manufacture multiple products, under multiple brands. Currently there are multiple systems used for order entries, which at some point will be moved to a single system.
However for the moment, they’re wanting to be able to carry out holistic customer service across all brands, to be able to enable all customer service agents to have access to the same data, customers able to be serviced in the same way, regardless of brand, etc.
As a result, Dynamics 365 Customer Service was the ticket, and has many standard capabilities that addresses the need of the customer.
Now, whilst sales (aka orders) will not be handled within Dynamics 365 itself, we didn’t want the customer service agents to have to look up order information in the ordering systems. Instead, we wanted to be able to bring the sales/order information into Dynamics 365 for reference (at some point it’s likely that the customer will actually use Dynamics 365 capabilities for sales as well).
In order to do this, we’ve had some amazing data architects bringing the data together into Azure Data Factory (ADF)) from the multiple order systems, and then pushing the data into Dynamics 365 (users have read-only view of it).
With bringing in the data, we were looking to capitalise on the native functionality of Dynamics 365, namely the ability for columns to be automatically calculated. An example of this would be bringing in the order line amount, the tax amount, and then having the total order line amount automatically calculated. This is standard system functionality, and when working in Dynamics 365, has many different uses across the system.
Now, it’s important to note here that as we’re not actually handling orders within Dynamics 365, we’re also not holding a ‘proper’ product list within Dynamics 365 itself. However, orders need to show product information on them (bit useless otherwise!), so we’re using the capability of ‘write-in products’.
Note: If you haven’t come across write-in products before, it’s actually a really great item. Essentially, it allows products to be entered for opportunities, quotes, orders etc (wherever products are used), but for when the product/s aren’t in the system product catalogue. Write-in products allow you to simply type the name of a product or service, & then type in the price. This is very useful if, for instance, a product isn’t yet available in the product catalogue, but you still want to be able to quote it. In our scenario, we’re using write-in products to avoid the need to manage the product catalogue itself. It’s also helpful for when you don’t want to use price lists, as all products need to be associated to a price list.
So we start off the data migration, and it’s looking good. No issues being reported by the integration…
But, then users go in to the UAT system to check through things, and find that when looking at orders, the totals aren’t being calculated:
Hmm. That’s strange. So we started to look at what could have caused this problem…
For clarification, we didn’t want to auto-calculate the information within ADF, and then push it into the relevant Dynamics 365 columns. We wanted to be able to rely on the system working in the way that it should!
Finally, we found out why the calculated columns weren’t working. There’s actually a system setting that governs how this works:
With this set, the auto calculations are now working in the system:
So, thankfully we managed to get this working, and everything went smoothly from that point.
Have you ever been caught out by something similar? I’d love to hear – please drop a comment below!
Talking to Zoe on our shared interest of low & slow BBQ, the importance of UI/UX in app development, and how imposter syndrome can affect us all.
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Chatting to Jeff around how he got into cooking, model/canvas app integration, and the benefits that OCM can bring to projects – quite interesting!
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Chatting to Michelle about her long-time interest in anime/manga, the wonders of #PowerAutomate cloud flows, & what might happen as a result of an unexpected loop…
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Let’s face it, and call a spade a spade (or a shovel, depending on where in the world you happen to be). Security roles are very important within Dataverse, to control what users can (& can’t!) do within the system. Setting them up can be quite time-consuming, and troubleshooting them can sometimes be a bit of a nightmare.
Obviously we need to ensure that users can carry out the actions that they’re supposed to do, and stop them doing any actions that they’re not supposed to do. This, believe it or not, is generally common sense (which can be lacking at times, I’ll admit).
Depending on the size of the organisation, and of course the project, the number of security roles can range from a few, to a LOT!
Testing out security can take quite a bit of time, to ensure that testing covers all necessary functionality. It’s a very granular approach, and can often feel like opening a door, to then find another closed door behind the first one. Error messages appear, a resolution is implemented, then another appears, etc…
Most of us aren’t new to this, and understand that it’s vitally important to work through these. We’ve seen lots of different errors over our lifetime of projects, and can usually identify (quickly) what’s going on, and what we need to resolve.
Last week, however, I had something new occur, that I’ve never seen before. I therefore thought it might be good to talk about it, so that if it happens to others, they’ll know how to handle it!
The scenario is as follows:
Now, initially we had some issues with different teams not having the right level of access, but we managed to handle those. Typically we’d see an error message along the following lines:
We’d then use this to narrow down the necessary permissions, adjust the security role, re-test, and continue (sometimes onto the next error message, but hey, that’s par for the course!).
However, just as we thought we had figured out all of the security roles, we had a small sub-set of users report an error that I had NEVER seen before.
The scenario was as follows:
Now this was a strange error. After all, the users were able to open/edit the lead record, and on checking the permissions in the security role, everything seemed to be set up alright.
The next step was to go look at the error log. In general, error logs can be a massive help (well, most of the time), assuming that the person looking at it can interpret what it means. The error log gave us the following:
As an aside, the most amusing thing about this particular error log, in my opinion, was that the HelpLink URL provided actually didn’t work! Ah well…
So on taking a look, we see that the user is missing the Read privilege (on what we’re assuming is the Lead table). This didn’t make sense – we then went back to DOUBLE-check, and indeed the user who was trying to carry out the action had read privileges on the table. It also didn’t make sense, as the user was able to open the lead record itself (disclaimer – I’ve not yet tried doing a security role where the user has create/write access to a table, but no read access..I’m wondering what would happen in such a scenario)
Then we had a lightbulb moment.
In truth, we should have probably figured this out before, which I’ll freely admit. See, if we take a look at the original error that the user was getting, they were getting this when trying to assign the record to another user. We had also seen that the error was only happening when the record was being assigned to certain users (ie it wasn’t happening for all users). And finally, after all, the error message title itself says ‘Assignee does not hold the required read permissions’.
So what was the issue? Well, it was actually quite simple (in hindsight!). The error was occurring when the record was being attempted to be assigned to a user that did not have any permissions to the Lead table!
What was the resolution? Well, to simply grant (read) access to the Lead table, and ensure that all necessary users had this granted to them! Thankfully a quick resolution (once we had worked out what was going on), and users were able to continue testing out the rest of the system.
Has something like this ever happened to you? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear the details!
Chatting with Yash on a multiple of topics, including #cryptocurrency, #blockchain, and the importance of having a good network in place!
If you’d like to come appear on the show, please sign up at http://bit.ly/2NqP5PV – I’d love to have you on it!
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It’s been a while since I’ve taken an exam. Admittedly, this is for two reason. Firstly, the renewal process for exams now (as updated last year) is not to take it again, but rather to re-qualify through Microsoft Learn. The second reason is that I’ve been waiting for some new exams to come out (OK – there’s the DA-100, which is still on my list of things to do…).
Well, there’s a new exam on the block. In fact, it’s a different type of exam – this is a ‘Speciality’ exam, rather than focusing on a specific type of application. It’s the first of its kind, though there are likely to be more to follow in the future.
It’s the MB-260, which is all around Customer Data. That’s right – it’s not about how to do sales, or customer service, or something else. It’s about taking the (holistic) approach to ALL of the data that we can hold on customers, and do something with it.
The official page for it is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-260https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-260. The specification for it is:
Candidates for this exam implement solutions that provide insights into customer profiles and that track engagement activities to help improve customer experiences and increase customer retention.
Candidates should have firsthand experience with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and one or more additional Dynamics 365 apps, Power Query, Microsoft Dataverse, Common Data Model, and Microsoft Power Platform. They should also have direct experience with practices related to privacy, compliance, consent, security, responsible AI, and data retention policy.
Candidates need experience with processes related to KPIs, data retention, validation, visualization, preparation, matching, fragmentation, segmentation, and enhancement. They should have a general understanding of Azure Machine Learning, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory.
Note that there’s quite a bit of Azure in there – it’s not just about Power Platform, Dataverse, or Dynamics 365. People who handle reporting on customer data should have various Azure skills as well.
There’s also a new type of badge that will be available:
At the time of writing, there are no official Microsoft Learning paths available to use to study. I do expect this to change in the near future, and will update this article when they’re out. However the objectives/sub-objectives are available to view from the main exam page, and I’d highly recommend going ahead & taking a good look at these.
As in my previous exam posts, I’m going to stress that it’s not permitted to share any of the exam questions. This is in the rules/acceptance for taking the exam. I’ve therefore put an overview of the sorts of questions that came up during my exam. (Note: exams are composed from question banks, so there could be many things that weren’t included in my exam, but could be included for someone else! ). I’ve tried to group things together as best as possible for the different subject areas.
Overall, I had 51 questions, which was towards the higher number of questions that I’ve experienced in my exams over the last year or so. There was only a single case study though.
Some of the naming conventions weren’t updated to the latest methods, which I would have expected. I still had a few references to ‘entities’ and ‘fields’ come up, though for the most part ‘tables’ and ‘columns’ were used. I guess it’s a matter of time to get everything up to speed with it.
Wow. It’s a lot of stuff. It’s definitely an exam that if you’re not already currently hands-on with the skills needed, I’d highly recommend you get a decent amount of experience with it before taking the exam!
I can’t tell you if I’ve passed it or not…YET!. Results aren’t going to be out for several months, and to be honest, I’m not quite sure how well I’ve actually done.
So, if you’re aiming to take it – I wish you the very best of luck, and let me know your experience!
Speaking to Antti around whiskey collecting (something that a lot of the #community seems to enjoy?), and the importance of PROPER requirements gathering during projects (especially around ‘low code’!)
If you’d like to come appear on the show, please sign up at http://bit.ly/2NqP5PV – I’d love to have you on it!
Click here to take a look at the other videos that are available to watch.